


Souls Lost at Sea

by lucymonster



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Bonding Over Shared Heartache, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Reminiscing, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:29:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25499125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: When Elizabeth passes away from old age, the sea goddess Calypso resurrects a dead man to help Will through his grief.
Relationships: James Norrington/Will Turner
Comments: 13
Kudos: 31
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	Souls Lost at Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neosaiyanangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neosaiyanangel/gifts).



The tailwinds blow strong today. James avoids the hustles and bustle on deck by keeping to the poop, knuckles white on the taffrail as he watches the sea churn behind the rudder. The wind in his face has the crisp salt taste of life itself – a taste he knows all the better for having once gone without it.

‘Your soul isn’t bound to the _Dutchman_ ,’ they tell him. ‘You never swore our oath. You can go ashore whenever you please.’ James has considered it. Extensively. But _ashore_ is a different place than he remembers: he’s been dead a long time, and in that time, the fires of human progress have spread coalpits across the land. Cities smoulder beneath the smoke-haze of industry run rampant. People dress differently. Talk differently. On the open waters, sailors talk of a new kind of ship: one with an inferno in its belly, belching steam as it cuts against the wind. 

James has yet to see one. For now, at least, life at sea is just how he remembers it – his only source of normalcy in a world gone strange.

The crew dislike him. ‘It’s not a passenger ship,’ he hears them mutter, angered by his soft palms as their rope calluses thicken. Sometimes one of the bolder ones will goad him to pull his weight, if he means to stay aboard, but they’re always silenced by a word from their captain.

Captain Will Turner.

Rougher than James remembers him, with wild hair and eyes dark like the ocean depths. 

He’s at the helm today, eyes on the horizon, scanning for signs that no one else can see of lives lost in shipwreck. If he sees one, he will leap into action, rallying the crew with coarse shouts and an authority absolute beyond the reach of defiance. He’s better at it than the tentacled monstrosity James remembers as Davy Jones. But for the time being no shipwrecks are in sight, and Will is silent.

‘You’re not bound to the _Dutchman_ ,’ they tell James. They have no way of knowing that he’s bound more tightly than any oath their sea god has it in her power to bind.

* * *

‘She died peacefully,’ says Will. ‘Old age. Our son was there, and all our grandchildren. It was two months before my next decade, but I visited her grave as soon as I could.’

James knows this story. Has heard it many a time over too much liquor, swapping the bottle back and forth without a care for the world outside the cabin. Life the second time around, he has learned, is rather like your second swig of rum: the thrill has already faded, and with it the relief of quenched thirst, and all you’re left with is the burnt taste of pirate’s vice and the sourness of tomorrow’s hangover.

For all that Will has changed, he hasn’t _aged_ a day, not in body. He speaks of a long life lived at ten-year intervals, of welcoming children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren into the world, all fierce with the blood of the last great Pirate King – a woman who in James’ mind’s eye will always be simply Elizabeth, the governor’s daughter with the radiant smile. So many things he missed in death. Some of them he’s privately glad to have missed. Pirate King? Ridiculous. But Will tells him the stories anyway, and he downs every detail like he once downed rum to fill the gaping emptiness.

These days, he’s more mindful of his demons. He sips slowly. Back and forth the rum bottle goes, then back and forth again, and his wits stay dry while Will’s grow sodden.

‘She used to wait for me out on the headlands,’ Will says. ‘She’d plan her whole day around it. Arrive before sunset and stand out there waiting as long as it took, to make sure she was the first sight I saw when the _Dutchman_ made harbour.’

He mourns a life James never got to live – a life stolen, whisked from under his nose at the very moment he was set to have it all. James sometimes thinks of stealing it back. Of gripping Will by his salt-stiff hair and kissing Elizabeth’s memory from his lips, tasting her ghost. He has heard the crew whisper of how grief drove Will mad until the sea god Calypso dragged James from his grave. They say Calypso has learnt a bitter lesson about leaving her ferrymen to sail the open seas alone. James thinks about the angry sea god in much the same way he thinks about the Pirate King story: rarely and reluctantly, with the evidence of its truth insufficient to numb the sting of its sheer unlikeliness. His inner self tells him he should despise this man, this Will, this interloping blacksmith who stole his life, claimed his corpse as a consolation prize, and now fills his ears with heathen nonsense.

His outer self says: ‘Another drink, then. To Elizabeth.’ He waits for the hatred but the hatred doesn’t come. Who is he to sneer at heathen nonsense under the circumstances? He _is_ heathen nonsense. The man who lived twice. Times like these he misses his rum habit.

‘She never forgot you, you know,’ Will says, slurring a little around a bottle rim still moist with the touch of James’s lips. If James drank a bit more, perhaps he could deem himself drunk enough that his sharp urge to lean in and kiss Will would be excusable. They share everything else. Liquor. A tiny captain’s cabin in the aftercastle (because James, bedraggled and reheated as he is, has not yet sunk so low as to bunk with Davy Jones’ crew). Their love for a woman long since gone from the living world (though they of all people know that death is not always the _final_ final resting place). Would it really be so wicked? They could share breath, share warmth, share the touch of their most private selves in a bunk large enough to house two entwined bodies – 

‘She kept your memory alive,’ Will slurs on. ‘Told the story of your sacrifice. Made sure all who loved her knew that they owed her life to your death.’

‘And yet,’ says James, forcing a wry smile, ‘here I am. Alive without her.’ It’s sacrifice turned inside out, the dignity of his death left crumpled on the floor like a discarded admiral’s coat.

‘Here you are,’ Will agrees, and holds his gaze – or tries to. His drunk eyes slip sideways to focus on nothing. 

James helps him to the bunk and leaves him there. Sleeps on a hammock slung under the porthole, the rhythm of Will’s breath melding into the sound of the lapping waves outside.

* * *

When the seas are calm they spar on deck, circling the capstan with racing pulses and whirling swords. They share their victories equitably, like pirate’s spoil. James is getting better at cheating: he has learned a way to kick the cargo hatch open at Will’s feet, so that Will stumbles at a crucial moment. Will likes to retaliate by slicing the ropes that hold their cargo in place. Mostly this leads to lightweight barrels skittering across the deck, but during one more vigorous fight he frees a cannonball that almost takes the first mate’s head off. There are new whispers now – whispers that their interest in each other is too keen, that they dull each other’s common sense and care only for their own mutual amusement.

James pays little heed. He expects the whispers will die down once the first mate’s headache abates.

Sometimes, after a match, they slump together with their backs against the foremast while Will tells stories of how he used to practice the blade with Elizabeth. She quickly exceeded him, he tells James, both in swordsmanship and in unswordsmanlike tricks and feints.

‘Hardly an achievement,’ James replies, ‘given the limited skill of her opponent.’ He has just won their latest match, and so earned the right to gloat until Will humbles him on their next clash. But it leaves a sour taste in his mouth to disparage Elizabeth even in passing.

There’s an exquisite cruelty in Will’s reminiscences, deep cuts that scar James’s heart. He’ll never see her skill in action; it lives on only in Will’s love. He wants to sink inside that love. Inhabit every corner of Will’s sunkissed soul, learn every vision of Elizabeth that lingers there. 

The stories pile up. It is becoming more and more difficult to tell where Elizabeth’s ghost ends and Will’s flesh begins.

* * *

The waves swell one night, and the ship is rocked so violently that James’s hammock becomes unusable.

‘Share my bunk,’ says Will as if it means nothing. They press together in the darkness, and it simply _happens,_ without thought for propriety or consequence. Will tastes like the ocean. James has no fear of drowning. There are, he already knows too well, worse ways to die at sea. Worse ways to forsake the laws of God and nature, to pledge yourself to the heathen gods in soul as well as body.

This way he’s found – it’s ecstasy. Fervour. James loses his bearings in the storm that is Will’s body, loses sight of Elizabeth’s brightness on the lost horizon. It’s only after, as they lie breathing and trembling together like the breathless culmination of one of their above-board jousts, that he realises he called the wrong name at his moment of completion.

It was meant to be about her. Somewhere along the line, it has become something else.

* * *

Sometimes the bitterness even fades to a more palatable taste. And one day, when the crew are out of earshot, Will says: ‘It’s been ten years since I last set foot on shore. Will you come with me this time?’

They visit her grave together. Standing before the headstone, their fingers thread through each other’s, James feels grief but no pain. Shared, the burden has become a tender blanket over his heart. A blanket beneath which he and Will can shelter together.

They pay their respects and leave their flowers. And when they go back to the _Dutchman,_ Will doesn’t insult James by asking if he wants to remain ashore. They mount the gangway together. Carry her memory back out to sea together.

Their lives, preserved in brine, go on.


End file.
